Friday, January 25, 2013

The ‘great
recession’ of the late 2000s began as the collapse of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model
of highly leveraged capitalism, but the countries that have suffered most have
been the Southern European democracies, often referred to as the ‘PIGS’[i].
The transformation of what started as a banking crisis into a sovereign debt
crisis has ended up engulfing countries who, for the most part, were not
particularly associated with the financial excesses of the boom years, and has
allowed debate to move away from reform of the financial system in the
Anglo-Saxon countries to the sustainability of government spending in Europe,
and particularly Southern Europe, and the future of the euro currency.